 So I rang the bell to open the meeting because we need to keep an eye on the time schedule today and I would like to welcome the team motor bay and we're very much looking forward to your presentation. The projection of the ECB's April monetary policy decision. It's of course very exciting because it's the exact day that also the governing council will discuss this. But first it's your turn to tell us what your analysis and assessment is. So please go ahead. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Michio Milanovic. We are team motor bay from St. Catherine's British School Athens, Greece. First I would like to thank you for the opportunity to come here today and share our projection of the ECB's April monetary policy decision with you. So firstly our presentation is structured as follows. We will give you a projection of the ECB's April monetary policy decision. We will then discuss the key influential factors that have led to our decision. We'll then do an economic analysis and a monetary analysis followed by a cross check and then we will further suggest any complementary policy for your own countries. So to start off our monetary policy decision is that the standard monetary policy will remain unchanged with the MRO, the main refinancing operations interest rate at 0.05% as it was initiated in September 2014. As for the non-standard monetary policy, we predict that the expanded asset purchase program will be carried out until end September 2016, amounting to 60 billion Euro monthly and that the credit easing package also go on with the long-term refinancing operations initiated in September 2014. So throughout our presentation we use a series of flowcharts and the white boxes they represent current events and the blue boxes they are our outlooks or our predictions. Moving on to the key factors. These are the key influential factors that have led to our decision. Firstly the accommodative monetary policy of the ECB. The components of the accommodative monetary policy are the credit easing package. These are the long-term refinancing operations which is the ECB giving loans with 24 month maturity to banks which is paid in six month intervals compared to the regular one week maturity loans. Secondly the asset purchase program which is the mass purchase of Euro area sovereign bonds. And thirdly the low MRO interest rate at 0.05%. Moving on to the effects of the APP. We have the mass purchase of Euro area sovereign bonds has led to the Euro, the price of the bonds increasing which in turn has lowered the yield for the bonds and this has had two effects. It's created a search for the yield but has also created an upside risk on economic sentiment. So the consumer confidence and the producer confidence are increasing and we can see that from the graph. We can see that the consumer confidence has been increasing which is the blue line on the graph which is over here and the industrial confidence together with the services confidence has also been increasing. And moving on to the search for the yield. So investors are now looking for more profitable investments. So because the yields are going lower on the bonds they are turning to the stock market and they are investing their money into stocks rather than the bonds. And we can see that the value of equity has been rising because of this. And we can see on this graph of the major Euro area stock markets we can see that they have all been drastically increasing since the announcement of the extended asset purchase program in January 2015. And we can see that the Euro stocks graph which is the blue line has drastically been increasing together with the DAX and also the IBEX which is the Spain stock market. Now this has led to an increase in private sector wealth as well as and therefore private consumption has been increasing but private consumption has also been affected by the consumer confidence. So together these two effects have an overall upside risk on output growth. Moving on to the effects of the credit easing package and the low MRO interest rates. We can see that these together have lowered the bank's refinancing costs which has had two main effects on the loans to non-financial corporations and the loans to households. And we can see from the graph that there's been a decelerating decline of loans to the non-financial corporations because of the lower bank refinancing costs. You can see that this is the green blue line at the bottom which is the loans to NFCs, the non-financial corporations has had a decelerating decline. So it's moving close to zero but we predict that in the future it could even grow positive so it will show a positive growth. As for the loans to households we can see that they have been steadily increasing and overall these two have resulted in an increase in the broad money supply which is the M3 as we can see from the red line up there. The red line which has increased by 4%. Now we'll move on to the Euro exchange rate movement and we'll pass on to George. So good morning ladies and gentlemen. I will be talking to you about the Euro exchange rate movement. So what are the cause and effects of the Euro exchange rate movement? We have asynchronous economic cycles between the Eurozone and the major economies that is the US is having steady growth whereas the Eurozone is having slower growth. We have diverging monetary policy of the major central banks. The US is now exiting its quantitative easing program. The ECB just initiated its expanded asset purchase program. We also have diverging Eurozone and global sovereign bond yields. US bond yields have remained the same whereas Euro area bonds have decreased with a few countries also being into negative yields. These three factors have led to the depreciation of the Euro against major currencies which has increased net export growth. Moving on to explain how net export growth has increased. We have boosted export competitiveness as a result of the weakening Euro which in the future we predict that will also bring weaker purchasing power. These combined will widen the trade surplus because we have increased exports but decreased imports. This in turn will bring net export growth and will increase aggregate demand since net export growth is a component of aggregate demand and this is currently bringing an upside risk to output growth. This can be seen from the figures right here. In quarter four the trade balance growth was 8% year on year whereas in Q4 2014 we have a year on year increase of 77% a massive increase in the figures of trade balance from quarter two to quarter four 2014. We have net export growth from minus 0.6 to 0.2 in quarter four 2014 and we also have a small increase in output growth of 0.1% year on year. Also the bilateral exchange rate has went from 137 in Q2 2014 to 1.074 in Q1 2015 so we can see a huge decrease in the bilateral exchange rate. I will now pass on to Alex so he can explain the oil price movement. Thank you. The next key influential factor that we will be talking about is the oil price movement that has been going on for the past 10 months or so. Now first we have to look at the causes of the oil price movement. What is causing this decline in oil prices? Well there is a supply and a demand side to this. On the supply side there has been a positive supply shock accelerating the supply of oil globally due to the accelerating US shale oil and gas production since 2013. On the demand side there have been decelerating emerging economies namely emerging economies have decreased their growth rates from double figures to single figures for example China and this has led to a global deceleration in the demand for oil. Now these two combined have led to a decrease in the oil in the prices of oil. Now the decrease in the price of oil has had two effects. First of all it has lowered the cost of production globally and within the eurozone as well as decreasing the prices of imported goods within the eurozone. Now to further look at the lower prices for imported goods in the eurozone we must first understand how drastic this change in the oil price decrease has been. By looking at the percentage change in the Brent price of oil we can see that it is halved from June 2014 which was its peak price. Now this has led to lower energy costs in the global economy and thus lower headline inflation in the global economy. What effects this has on the eurozone is that import prices in the eurozone have gone down the prices of imported energy and the prices of imported foods. So what is happening is that the eurozone is importing deflation from the global economy and this has reduced headline inflation within the eurozone as can be seen from the graph here where you can see the OECD CPI both headline and core as well as the eurozone HICP both headline and core and you can see that the headline inflations of both the OECD and the eurozone have decreased greatly due to the decrease in energy prices. As well this graph also highlights the decreasing import prices which have a huge weight on the eurozone HICP and these decreasing import prices are as I said the decreasing imported energy and the decreasing imported food. Now as the two graphs are nearly symmetrical the other effect of the oil price decline are the lower cost of production in the eurozone. Now what has happened is that as energy costs have decreased due to the decrease in the price of oil the cost of production have decreased. Now the table here shows the oil indexed gas price indicator of Northwest Europe which shows that energy costs have decreased. We have two indicators one being the euro per megawatt hour the other being dollars per MMBTU which can be in a sense compared to a barrel of oil but for natural gas and you can see that both of these have been decreasing and are expected to decrease for April, May and June of 2015 due to time lags involved in the contracts that are signed for the backpricing of gas. This in turn has decreased cost of production as can be seen by the producer price index for the eurozone which has decreased since June 2014 and this is expected to boost aggregate supply. Now combined with what George explained to be a stronger export competitiveness and a boosted aggregate demand we believe that this poses a future upside risk to output growth. Now I will pass on to George, to Ari. Hello, I will be talking to you about the impact of stress countries on the eurozone and on today's decision. So let us first look at the causes and effects of stress in the eurozone. Due to the fiscal consolidation undertaken in specific countries for them to meet the stability and growth pact it has been a severe recession over the past few years especially since the financial crisis and so in these countries there has been political instability as a result and also as a result we can see high unemployment. These two factors have had an impact on inflation or will have an impact on inflation in the future. Firstly looking at political instability together with the low interest rate environment which we can see from the negative deposit facility interest rate which is minus 0.1%, it was minus 0.1%, now it's minus 0.2%. There has been a higher demand for cash, an increase in the demand for cash together with the uncertain political conditions shown by the spread of the Greek and the German 10-year bond since June 2014 which has actually doubled. These two factors have led to an increase as I said before in demand for cash and also an increase as a result in the demand or as a result an increase in the growth of overnight deposits from 5.4% to 9.3% and also a decrease in the short-term deposits shown by the indicator of M2 minus M1 gone from minus 1.8% to minus 3.3%. So in general this has led to a high proportion of liquid assets in the M3 so the M1 over M3 ratio has increased from 55.79% to 58.41%. I will explain later how this may have an impact in the future. Moving on to the impact of high unemployment and recession due to the excess labor supply which is lower wages and due to the recession which has forced market participants to lead to price adjustments. As a result there has been a decrease in the cornflation in the stressed countries which has been passed on to the rest of the year zone. This can be seen from this graph where the black line is specifically the Euro area unit labor cost growth. Unit labor cost growth actually includes both wages and salaries and this has gone from 4% to 1.4%. This can also be seen in the case of cornflation together with the stressed countries, the black line, the Eurozone cornflation has gone to a 0.7% level. So now we'll be passing on to George. To summarize our economic analysis we have two opposing trends. On the left we have the asset purchase program which has led to accelerated private consumption as well as accelerated private investment. This has in turn accelerated aggregate demand combined with the accelerated net exports as a result of the lower exchange rate of the Euro compared to other major currencies. This in turn has, we predict that in an outlook there would be an upside risk to price stability as a result of the increase in aggregate demand. Also there is a current upside risk to output growth as a result of the increase in aggregate demand. And on the right side we have the downward pressures which are the decreasing oil prices as well as high unemployment. Lower oil prices have led to lower cost of production as Alex said, as well as lower energy prices. These have in turn and will, I'm sorry, the cost of production will in turn increase aggregate supply in the future as well as energy prices will contribute to lower headline inflation as Alex explained previously and high unemployment is going to lead to lower core inflation which will contribute to lower headline inflation and also in turn to a current downside risk on price stability. We believe that the left side will prevail and that it, to the right side and that is why we decide to keep, we have projected that the MRO will remain the same. I will now pass on to our studies to summarize our monetary analysis. So we believe, so we believe in general that there is a subtle risk as we will explain later. But firstly let us look at what Michele explained before with regard to the credit easing package and the low MRO interest rate. As a result of the two above there has been an increase in the credit growth putting an upward pressure and acceleration of the broad money aggregate namely M3 and which actually poses an upside risk to price stability because of the increase in the money supply. Now coming back to the political instability and the low interest rate environment which has led to a higher demand for cash. As a result of the high proportion of liquid assets there has been a lower proportion of illiquid assets and so we believe in the future this will mean that there will be less money available for credit for banks to have available for them to lend leading to a deceleration in the credit growth, a deceleration in the broad money aggregate and posing a downside risk possibly to price stability. We believe that the left hand side will prevail as will my friend Varadis explain now. By cross checking the economic and monetary analysis we can confirm that if the accommodative monetary policy continues it should bring inflation rates towards levels of below but close to 2% in the medium term. However, we propose that European countries adopt certain complementary policies for the accommodative monetary policy. This includes both fiscal policies and supply structural reforms. In the case of fiscal policy we can see that the stressed countries should ensure debt sustainability while in accordance with the stability and growth pact. This means that government budget deficit should remain below 3%. While countries with an available budgetary scope which means that they have a balanced or perhaps a surplus in their budget are recommended to accommodate easy monetary policy with a growth friendly fiscal policy. In addition, structural reforms can be seen through the labor market reforms which will restore export competitiveness in stressed countries through reducing job security and perhaps reducing unemployment benefit eligibility and through product market reforms which will create a competitive environment in these stressed countries and through privatisations and regulation and we can see that this will in the long term perhaps promote growth. So on behalf of Team Motorway I would like to thank you for your attention. This has been our projection for a decision today and we're now open to any questions you may pose. Thank you.